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SOCIAL CLASS AND CHILDREN'S UNDERSTANDING OF DEEP STRUCTURE IN SENTENCES
Author(s) -
DEWART M. HEZLETT
Publication year - 1972
Publication title -
british journal of educational psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.557
H-Index - 95
eISSN - 2044-8279
pISSN - 0007-0998
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8279.1972.tb00712.x
Subject(s) - psychology , sentence , social class , class (philosophy) , test (biology) , linguistics , developmental psychology , artificial intelligence , computer science , paleontology , philosophy , political science , law , biology
S ummary . An attempt was made to test children's ability to comprehend passive voice sentences and related sentence structures in which deep and surface structure differ considerably. 44 children (aged from 5:3 to 6:6) from two social class groups were asked to manipulate objects to correspond to sentences spoken by the experimenter. Middle‐class children made fewer errors than working‐class children. The findings suggest that there may be social class differences in the rate at which children acquire a mastery of the syntactic rule system of the language.